This has the potential to be super hype, but if it's just Warring Triad... Eeehhh... I'm hoping there's more to it than that, especially with some of the very exciting theories I've seen floating around.

Fanfest really can't come soon enough. Haha.

Genuinely the best piece of writing I've read in the past year. I can only dream of making something so eloquent look so effortless.

It's crazy how we can go from temperate, pleasant weather to "my house feels like it has been flung directly into the Sun" in the span of a week.

Oh, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't super care for the second act of the game. The mechanics it introduces didn't really grab me, and it lacks both a central antagonist and the meta aspect I loved from acts 1 and 3 where you can get out of your chair and explore your surroundings.

Apologies in advance to any Gravity Rush 2 fans out there. (I desperately wanted to like it more than I did, but the more I played it, the more its flaws became too egregious to ignore.)

And I do know my close friends would miss me, and I love them for that, but it just tears me up inside to think about how much I've lost over the years.

Just one of those days, I guess.

Sorry for angstposting on main, but I struggle somewhat frequently with wondering if anyone would miss me when I'm gone, and it's pretty bad today. Just thinking back to two years ago when I had tons of friends/associates in FF and elsewhere, and now they're almost completely gone from my life.

Funny thing is, I've found myself claiming free games on Epic only to later buy them on Steam so I don't have to deal with Epic's launcher.

Even jangling a set of keys in front of my face every so often hasn't stopped me from seeing EGS as anything more than an inconvenience. Impressive, really.

I'm planning to play through the rest of the series at some point (minus Silent Hill 1/Shattered Memories—I played those ages ago and have no real desire to revisit them), so I'm curious to see how they hold up. I'll be ending on Silent Hill f though, because Ryukishi is my GOAT.

11. Silent Hill 2 Remake

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this remake, though I do think it's unnecessarily bloated. Brookhaven Hospital is just a drag, made all the worse by the fact that you have to go through the whole thing twice. But on the whole, a pretty respectable effort.

Magitek that's being piloted by voidsent is a gold mine of untapped potential. Kind of low-key hope that's one of the major threats we'll be facing next expansion.

...But who knows, considering lunar primals were a thing back in ShB for all of like one or two patches. Lol

Need to eat some bananas before they go bad, but it's late and I didn't feel like eating them anymore, so I just said in a very commanding tone, "I WILL fulfill my purpose," and somehow that gave me the motivation to eat them again.

I should do this more often.

I don't know if Shin Megami Tensei VI has entered development yet, but after V and Vengeance, I desperately, /desperately/ want Ryota Kozuki to be lead composer again.

Nearly a year after playing it, Vengeance still has my favorite RPG soundtrack... maybe ever? It's freaking nuts, honestly.

I did eventually get it working, and it runs well enough, but dear GOD. I hope current-gen games aren't as broken 15 years from now as some of these old Ubisoft games are. No one wants to sit down with a game only to end up with 20 tabs/windows open just trying to get the darn thing to boot.

Immediately after I uninstalled Far Cry 2 in despair, I turned my focus to its highly acclaimed sequel, Far Cry 3, which, uh...

Turns out in order to play Far Cry 3 on modern hardware, you have to perform several esoteric rituals and sacrifice your firstborn child to the elder gods at Ubisoft.

10. Far Cry 2

This one hurts because I didn't actually get to finish it. I encountered a game-breaking softlock that affected every one of my saves and prematurely ended my playthrough.

That said, what a remarkably fun and ambitious game. If only it wasn't held together with duct tape... 😔

My sister-in-law is here for the weekend with my baby nephew, and this child is constantly raging against his very existence. LOL

(You can probably tell by my tone that I'm still feeling vindictive over this nearly a decade after the fact. I'll never forget how all my complaints, many of which were corroborated by security footage, were ignored and that I had to do the work of two people for /way/ too long.)

Same thing happens in a lot of industries. One of the managers at the warehouse I used to work at practically begged me to at least stay on part-time, because we both knew the other guy in my section was a lazy, worthless sack of crap.

Needless to say, he didn't last long once I was gone. 😌

Basically, I think this is one instance where the creator has every reason to be super protective/a control freak. Lol

These are SSS-tier difficulty games to localize, and if anything were to go wrong, I can't even begin to imagine the vitriol it'd generate. Not to mention, Toby strikes me as the kind of person who would never, /ever/ be able to forgive himself if a translation didn't meet his exacting standards.

Undertale and Deltarune are two of the most personal and carefully constructed games in the history of the medium, so Toby's reticence to just hand them off to a team (even if they're some of the best in the biz) and go, "Hey, I trust you to do my life's work justice," is totally valid imo.

To give a quick example, when I reached the final /big/ layer, my immediate thought was, "I kind of wish the game would just wrap things up before it overstays its welcome."

...And then that layer turned out to be one of my favorites (lol). But the game really does toe the line.

If I had to say anything against Bananza, I do think it gets a bit long in the tooth. Which is... odd, because I usually don't feel that way about platformers? But man, if you're going for 100%, this game is just stuffed to the gills with collectibles.

9. Donkey Kong Bananza

Finally locked in and finished this last night. Going to sound like a weird analogy, but this is the Switch 2's Bloodborne. Absolutely killer game from start to finish that made me look at my console after the fact and go, "I'm so glad I bought this."

Absolutely phenomenal.

8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge

Fun, breezy beat 'em up for people like me (?) who are historically terrible at beat 'em ups. The soundtrack is, without question, the star of the show here. I could listen to some of these tracks all day.

...Not much else to say, really.

Now I'm going to have Danganronpa 2x2, Magical Girl Witch Trials, and Hundred Line (which @bishounenp.bsky.social was kind enough to gift me for my birthday) to play this year.

Lord help me if THIS is the year Capcom finally decides to announce AA7 too. It's so over for me. 💀

This timeline fucking sucks so bad, dude.